Robotics
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[lego mindstorms] |
My interest in robotics started at about the same time as my interest in computers. The latter was sparked by my dad taking me to the families' open day at RAE Farnborough when I was five.
He proudly showed off his new machine, which displayed numbers using valves that actuially said "1", "2" and so on, rather than the "old" octal counters. Octal seemed to me to make sense, and somewhere along the line, I'd learned to add and subtract in octal and hex by the time I was six.
At ten, the "School Maths Project" books introduced bases with the idea of Martians, who used base 13. While everyone else was struggling with the concept of something other than base10, I was trying to figure out why Martians had a different number of fingers on their hands - didn't matter how many hands, 13 is prime. (It's also the base used for the answer to the ultimate question in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", but since his untimely death I doubt we'll ever know.) There were much brighter kids in the class, looking back, but for a tiny period, I could do something they couldn't. I've loved computers ever since. And suddenly, hex is cool again, being the language of colours on the internet.
My love of monorails started at about age eight or nine, when "Peggy" from the sweet shop gave me a monorail set for my birthday. Sixteen sections of track that made a circle and a passenger car that went round, and round, and... I loved it. I guess it got thrown out when I went to university, and I've been trying to recover that magic of being eight ever since. The story of why I got the Mindstorms set is here.
Someday, I'll post about the Usborne robot, and about Trundle. For now, I await my Cricket with bated breath.
Somewhere along the line, I've made some good friends. I suspect that amateur robotics is like that. I hope that I can give something back to the community, even if it is wooden monorails.